Overhearing an American saying to his co-fl\u00e2neur one day, \u2018It\u2019s like downhill all the way?\u2019 I wondered, as his words faded with blessed distance, what exactly could be \u2018like\u2019 downhill.<\/p>\n
Because if it were downhill, it wouldn\u2019t be \u2018like\u2019 downhill \u2013 it would be downhill. If it weren\u2019t downhill, then it would be either level or uphill, but it would make no more sense to say that \u2018level\u2019 is \u2018like downhill\u2019 than it would be to say \u2018level\u2019 is \u2018like uphill\u2019 \u2013 either way, you\u2019re saying \u2018A equals not-A\u2019 \u2013 similarly, if it were uphill, you saying that\u2019s \u2018like downhill\u2019 would be saying \u2018uphill is like downhill\u2019 or \u2018A is the opposite of A\u2019 (or A = A\u2019 or A complement), which also makes no formal logical sense.<\/p>\n
I couldn\u2019t think of a literal case of something whose physical properties shared certain undefined second-order aspects of downhillness (\u2018like downhill\u2019) while remaining untouched by any of the central, indeed defining characteristics that make up the essence of The Downhill. Staying with the literal, if there be an essence, it must inhere in a mathematically statable proposition about the physical world (in what I\u2019m pleased to call \u2018the universe\u2019) that posits a measurable difference between two values, the lesser of which, in three dimensions, would be deemed by any sane observer to be \u2018downhill\u2019 from the greater (assuming, of course, that the American I overheard wasn\u2019t talking non-Euclideanly).<\/p>\n
However, bringing in time \u2013 the fourth dimension \u2013 on the other other other other hand, allowed me to pan his statement for nuggets of metaphor. Maybe, when the guy said, \u2018It\u2019s like downhill all the way?\u2019, he was describing some personal experience unfolding over time that wasn\u2019t entrely or irremediably bad \u2013 i.e, \u2018downhill\u2019 \u2013 but was rather an experience \u2018like downhill\u2019, implying particular moments of reprieve from a seemingly unstoppable descent. So his \u2018like downhill\u2019 could have been referring to some biographical path arising from a life decision that had set its protagonist barrelling downwards towards regret, embarrassment, anomie, ennui or good old despair, not full-tilt (\u2018downhill\u2019) but intermittently (\u2018like downhill\u2019) somewhat in the manner of a mountaineer gaining fleeting purchase on various gorse bushes and stony outcrops in the unhappy course his or her earthward plummet, said purchase providing merely temporary respite from gravity\u2019s inviolable pull. Hope lifted and then, as ever, dashed.
\nCatching for two seconds the arse-end of an American\u2019s conversation just as you\u2019re coming out of a Bioladen on Bernauer Strasse doesn\u2019t furnish enough evidence to exclude the possibility of his being some kind of artist.<\/p>\n
We just don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
\u2018It\u2019s like downhill all the way?\u2019 could be a Hamletty self-depiction of his career path or oeuvre over time rather than a literal description of, say, the bike route to an exhibition of the works of a somewhat more successful, talented or lucky competitor.<\/p>\n
But I may still be on the wrong interpretational track. Maybe I\u2019ve been getting too hung up on meaning \u2013 snagged on the semantic, to return to the falling-mountaineer metaphor \u2013 so it\u2019s not that a gorse bush is like a tree but it\u2019s, like, a tree? There is a chance that \u2018like\u2019 is nothing more than a tic \u2013 a function of musculature rather than meaning, similar to, say, a squint \u2013 commonly littering various speech acts. Transcribing \u2018It\u2019s, like, downhill all the way?\u2019 would then result in a \u2018like\u2019 huddled between two commas: not quite a subclause (an \u2018unclause\u2019, perhaps). So \u2018like\u2019 would be something less than a word or an item with specific lexical content and more a Tourette\u2019s vocalisation, a piece of viral linguistic software meme\u2019d into the English language over the past two or three decades, possibly having no equivalent in any other language.<\/p>\n
This strange half-lingual, half-glottal caesura seems versatile or insidious enough to be placed before or after any verb, adjective, adverb, part of speech or complete sentence whatsoever. Making \u2018like\u2019 as common and as tedious as breath.<\/p>\n
I recognise, indeed have a lot of sympathy with the counter-argument that \u2018like\u2019 can be construed as signalling a post-modern tentativeness about the authenticity of the narrative voice, a certain modesty about the processes and products of one\u2019s own mentation or the premises underlying one\u2019s statements about the world but, when I overheard another American on the street saying to his partner, after a long pause, \u2018Like… like\u2019, I started to wonder whether we\u2019re losing that vocabulary which differentiates between the varying ways we apprehend physical, mental, emotional and \u2013 dare I say? \u2013 moral reality.
\nI can only assume that, when this second American said, \u2018Like… like\u2019 to his partner, the first \u2018like\u2019 was the usual prefatory social cough to introduce a statement, while the second \u2018like\u2019 was the stand-in or representative of the statement itself. So \u2018Like… like\u2019 was him saying, \u2018First, I\u2019m introducing what I want to say, and second, this is what I want to say.\u2019 But, if his introduction to what he wanted to say could be
\nencapsulated in the word \u2018like\u2019 and what he actually wanted to say could also be encapsulated in the word \u2018like\u2019, then we\u2019ve arrived at a conversational point where meaning is unable to escape from the singularity which arises when a sound that\u2019s maybe not even a word any more becomes a synonym for everything or nothing.<\/p>\n
Take this as patronising, perhaps, but when I heard this second American say \u2018Like… like\u2019, I felt so fucking sorry for him. I\u2019m sure he was a lovely guy but for me he was just signposting a lack of reflexive awareness or mindfulness towards his own thoughts. My four-year old son gets this. When I say, \u2018It\u2019s like red,\u2019 he says, \u2018It\u2019s not like red \u2013 it is red.\u2019 Maybe that\u2019s a four-year old\u2019s literalness. But he does make me think about what I\u2019m saying, and about whether what I\u2019m saying about the world is actually worth saying rather than just a blabbering load of old flappy jaw-noise.<\/p>\n
If the richness and nuance of the experiences that characterise our response to the world can be rendered down into such undemanding gloop as \u2018like\u2019, then it really is downhill all the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Overhearing an American saying to his co-fl\u00e2neur one day, \u2018It\u2019s like downhill all the way?\u2019 I wondered, as his words faded with blessed distance, what exactly could be \u2018like\u2019 downhill. Because if it were downhill, it wouldn\u2019t be \u2018like\u2019 downhill \u2013 it would be downhill. If it weren\u2019t downhill, then it would be either level […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":12571,"template":"","categories":[16,10],"class_list":["post-10284","stsp_text","type-stsp_text","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-14","category-prosa"],"yoast_head":"\n